SAFE Act, making open WiFi and more a liability.

You can thank your Congressman for this one.

Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act, or SAFE Act–will “ensure better reporting, investigation, and prosecution of those who use the Internet to distribute images of illegal child pornography.”

The bill would require anyone providing an “electronic communication service” or a “remote computing service” to record and report information any time they “learn” that their network was used for certain broadly defined illegal activities concerning obscene images. That’s double trouble, as both the illegal activities and the classification of who counts as a service provider are so broadly defined. McCullough notes that anyone providing an open WiFi network, a social network, a domain registry or even a webmail service probably qualify under the law.

Not one Democrat opposed the SAFE Act. Two Republicans did: Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning presidential candidate from Texas, and Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia.

Oh yah, this is a rewrite of a previous bill that had not passed, and the rewrite was not made public before the vote.